According to George Orwell, even homicide had its golden age. In his 1946 essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, he discusses what he calls ‘our great period in murder’, which was roughly from 1850 to 1925. He holds up nine murders (and ten murderers) whose reputations, he says, have stood the test of time. Jack the Ripper is among them, of course, but he is a category of his own. In the other eight cases, the murderers and their victims were almost entirely middle-class, the settings domestic and poison the favoured weapon. One of these — and arguably the locus classicus, as it were, of the Golden Age of Murder — was the Crippen case.

There has not been a major re-examination of the case for nearly 30 years. David James Smith’s book is welcome on that ground alone, all the more so because many of the case’s details are still obscure. Some earlier accounts, both at the time of the trial and afterwards, did not let historical accuracy stand in the way of a good story or a quick buck.

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